


a rare talent

by roseisreturning



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Academic!Eve, Alternate Universe - Bluebeard Fusion, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Fairy Tale Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:40:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23901727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseisreturning/pseuds/roseisreturning
Summary: In hindsight, Eve will know that their meeting was never anything close to chance, but, in the moment, she believes that it starts with a mistake. Or, leaning further into Bluebeard, heavily inspired by Angela Carter.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 4
Kudos: 32





	a rare talent

**Author's Note:**

> My annual "I guess I'm posting fic now" contribution, brought to you by feeling extremely validated by the dynamic playing out in season three. Incredibly self-indulgent, so turn away if you're here for an airtight plot. If you're here for detailed descriptions of mirrors, hands, and unexplained magical injury, however... please enjoy.

_I was afraid not of him; but of myself. I seemed reborn in his unreflective eyes, reborn in unfamiliar shapes. I hardly recognized myself from his descriptions of me and yet, and yet—might there not be a grain of beastly truth in them? And, in the red firelight, I blushed again, unnoticed, to think he might have chosen me because, in my innocence, he sensed a rare talent for corruption._ \- Angela Carter, “The Bloody Chamber”

* * *

They meet in a coffeeshop. In hindsight, Eve will know that this was never anything close to chance, but, in the moment, she believes that it starts with a mistake. A woman with honey-colored hair waits behind her, her face buried behind a paperback book. _Traumnovelle_. Even as she lifts the disposable cup from the counter, her eyes are on the page.

“Excuse me.”

The woman doesn’t look up. Eve repeats herself. The woman keeps walking, even turns a page. Eve reaches for her shoulder, midway between a tap and a grab. The woman turns, pressing the pages of the open book against her face, so that Eve can see nothing below her eyes.

“Uh, hi,” Eve says. She’s decided that the woman’s just _off_ , not an asshole. She tries to be kind. “You have my order.”

“I know what I ordered,” she says. Her accent isn’t native. Then, neither is Eve’s. “They called it out.”

“Yeah, uh, sorry, it’s just— I’m already late for this thing, and, since you ordered after I did—“

“I think your order just came out.” She points in the direction of the counter. Eve doesn’t look. She’s ruled out her initial impression—that is, that the woman wasn’t an asshole—and she feels almost vengeful because of it. The feeling is only half new, the other part being one of Niko’s more unpleasant discoveries preceding their separation. Eve leans into the familiarity and decides: She won’t acquiesce.

She says, “It’s yours.”

“You want me to give you the coffee that I am holding, so I get the fresh one.”

“They’re both fresh.”

“All right, all right, I’m sorry.” She hands over the coffee, neither looking nor sounding much of anything other than inconvenienced. “Here,” she says. “You can have my coffee, and I will buy you one the next time you’re here.”

“I don’t—“

“Hurry!” the woman tells her—mockingly, probably, but her face, expressive but still half-covered, is too indecipherable for Eve to be sure. “You don’t want to miss your thing.”

This is how they part.

* * *

At work, Eve’s shit hours get worse. She knows that it’s easy to give them to her. She doesn’t have a family anymore, or much of a life, and she’s barely on time to the more decent shifts, anyway. She doesn’t bother coming back to the coffeeshop. She forgets about the woman who promised her a drink. She sleeps with a man who buys her another. It’s mediocre. The sex is, anyway. The drink is awful. And the next morning, she needs an excuse to get him out of her apartment. She pretends she works normal hours, like a normal person. That she’s in a rush. They leave together. When he turns left, she heads for the coffeeshop. It’s an easy cover, if nothing else. And then she remembers the woman. She comes in after Eve, just as before, and catches her mid-order.

“Wait!” she says. Eve turns. “I’m paying for you.”

“Oh, you really don’t need to—“

“Please.” She grips Eve’s shoulder too tightly for too long. “You had a long night.”

“That obvious?”

The woman reaches past Eve toward the counter, extending a card. She’s wearing perfume. Something nice. Expensive. She says, “One more of hers.”

They wait together, then sit together, then talk together. Eve can’t remember wanting to do any of this. She can’t remember deciding to. She can’t even remember the woman’s name. The only name she can remember belongs to the perfume: La Villanelle. She remembers hating it.

The woman’s scarf drops slightly from her chin, and she rushes to cover her face with it. Eve hates the scarf, too. It’s gaudy and gorgeous and definitely older than the woman wearing it. Eve’s age, maybe. Vintage. She can’t help staring at it—bright blue silk patterned with vivid reds and golds. It takes until the second time it slips for Eve to notice what it’s covering. A bruise, deep purple traced by a blue just paler than her scarf, sits perfectly with too-clean edges on her jaw.

“You’re hurt,” Eve says, not knowing if it’s true. The bruise is eerily neat, looking closer to ink on skin than blood underneath it. But it’s too big for that, and too deep.

“Excuse me?”

“Your face, I hadn’t—“ Eve imagines a thousand terrible histories for this woman, and none comes close to the truth. “Are you—?” she asks. “Did someone—?”

The woman smiles. It’s charming. Calm. “Very flattering,” she says, and something glitters in her eyes. “How do you know this isn’t my face?”

“It isn’t,” Eve says. She will decide, later, that she was wrong about this, but never admit that she didn’t want to be. No version of Eve will admit to wanting anything more than to help, not now. Eve, at least in the beginning, must have been good. She says, “If your husband, or your—“

“I don’t have a husband.”

“I can help you.”

The woman smirks. “Help me find a husband?”

“No. With this.” Eve gestures toward the bruise. She realizes how near they are to each other. How easily she could touch it, with just a little less command over herself.

“I don’t need to be helped.”

“Villanelle, please—“

“Villanelle?” She laughs, open-mouthed. Too much. “Eve, that is my perfume! Do you not know my name? Oh, you are too good, Eve.”

“I’m sorry—“

“No, no, don’t apologize. Call me Villanelle. It will be our joke.”

It will be. It isn’t yet.

* * *

The third time they meet, the woman is later still. Eve is already settled into a corner,shoulders already hunched over her screen, when she hears the chair’s metal feet dragging on the floor. The woman settles in, rests an arm on the too-small table, and says, “You asked the barista for my name.”

“I’m sorry,” Eve says. (She isn’t. This Eve is still trying to be kind and good and noble, when she says this, but even this Eve cannot be sorry. This Eve believes she was right.) “I thought…“

“My husband?” Oksana nudges her, like it’s a joke between old friends.

Eve doesn’t react. She says, “You don’t have one.”

“So, you figured it out.”

“Yes. You don’t have to be a dick about it. I just wanted to be sure. Whoever did this to you, you don’t have to protect them.“

Oksana smiles. Eve knows about her now, or at least knows more, but she can’t help being taken in. She can’t help forgetting that she isn’t the first. “If you’re so worried about my home life,” she says, and she leans further into her hand, so that her elbow pushes Eve’s laptop against the wall, “you could always come and see it.”

Eve mirrors her, trying to buy herself time. She was supposed to script this, last night, before she came here. She’d been planning it. “Oh, I wouldn’t—“

“You’re curious!” Oksana insists. She’s giddy and incredibly close.

Eve suspects herself of a contact high. She needs to be careful now. She doesn’t meet Oksana’s gaze. “No, no—“

Oksana leans closer still. Her perfume is different than Eve remembers it, just slightly. Brighter. “Admit it, you are.”

“Fine, yes, I’m curious.”

A smile, one that creeps into her voice: “What did you find?”

“You don’t have a husband,” Eve says. She found more. Names. Places. Photos. Accusations that led nowhere. Enough to know that some of it is best kept to herself. Later, Eve will remember the linguistics degree and regret not mentioning this instead. Eve talks more easily of academia than relationships. She could have directed the conversation anywhere from there.

But Eve will remember the linguistics degree only later, and Oksana smiles drily. “You know,” she says, “I think I’ve heard that.” And then, without so much as a breath, “Come visit me.”

“Why would I do that?”

“I’m lonely.”

Eve wants to ask her how she could be lonely with half a dozen women reported to have come to stay with her. She wants to ask her how one woman could attract so much tragedy. She wants to ask her this, just to beat her to the answer. But more than any of that, she wants proof. “Okay,” she says. Already, her heart is pounding.

* * *

Oksana’s home is over an hour by train from Eve’s flat and so obscured by fog that Eve doubts she would have found it had she come alone. There’s water nearby. The sea. Oksana catches Eve searching for it through the white. She says, “We can go later,” and she takes her by the hand. Led in like this, Eve wonders how many women have left. She wonders how.

She enters anyway. They do. The whole place smells of her perfume, of oak and citrus and moss. It should be suffocating, being surrounded by it all. It _is_ suffocating. But Oksana reaches for the small of Eve’s back, and Eve only waits to be drowned.

Oksana removes her scarf—this one the red of a slit throat, white flowers seeming to burst from it—only after they reach the third floor. The bruise is still there, still too clean and too dark to make sense. Without the feigned hesitation of the last time, Oksana seems at once more repulsive and more beautiful. Eve stares. This is part of the script. Whatever Oksana is, Eve has seen her. She has stared long enough to know that she wants to be seen. Oksana opens a door.

The room is large and dark and filled with at least a dozen gold-rimmed mirrors, so that Eve can hardly tell what is real and what is reflection. She steps inside. Oksana’s eyes follow her movements. In the dim of the bedroom, her pupils wide, they look almost black.

“It’s yours,” she says.

“Mine?”

“We are having a late dinner. No trains come after eleven.”

“Oh,” Eve says. The script is no longer her own. “I didn’t think…”

“It’s okay.” Oksana’s voice is gentle, reassuring, getting just barely deeper at the end. Like the smile that follows, the voice isn’t quite right, isn’t quite hers. “I thought for you.”

* * *

On the first night—the night that is meant to be the only one—Eve asks how many people work for her, if she even knows or cares or considers them anything more than furniture. She doesn’t say the last part. She knows the answer.

“Of course I _know_ , Eve,” says Oksana. She impales a halved artichoke and studies it lazily. “I have to pay them.”

“How?”

Oksana replies with her mouth full: “How what?”

“How do you afford it?”

An exaggerated shrug. “You looked me up,” she says.

“Okay,” Eve says. “The records say this place is inherited. You don’t work. Not as far as I can tell. Not on paper.”

“You don’t believe it. Why not?”

Eve knows the answer Oksana needs. She says, “I believe you.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I do. Last week. You told me you were in Paris for work. I believe you.”

“Why?”

Eve believes her because she knows how it feels to do nothing every day, and she believes her because she knows Oksana would hate it. She knows that _she_ would hate it too. But Eve has said too much already; she can’t let Oksana know her. She lies. She says, “I don’t know.” She says, “I trust you.”

“Will you stay here?”

“I—“ And Eve can hardly believe her now, can hardly believe that this is how it goes. She had always imagined something subtler, some trick to make it seem it was all Eve’s idea. But here it is, perfectly clear: the invitation to abandon everything. Eve wants to say, _I have a life_ , but this isn’t true anymore. She wants to bolt from the place—fuck the train schedule, she’ll find a way out—but she can’t bring herself to move. Voice trembling, maybe from laughter and maybe from fear, she says, “Am I supposed to find that charming?”

“No. I am naturally charismatic. This is just a suggestion.”

“Why are you making it?”

Oksana takes another bite of lamb, and Eve watches the never-fading bruise move with the muscle in her jaw. Like before, she doesn’t swallow before speaking. “You’re bored in London,” she says. “And the rent there is horrible. You could sublet your flat.”

“And live with you?”

“You know, I am making you a really good offer right now.”

“I barely know you.”

“You know a lot about me. You looked me up. Stay for a week. We’ll be like old friends.”

Eve’s read Jane Eyre. She’s dedicated two-thirds a chapter of her unfinished dissertation to Belle Gunness. She’s smarter than to think this woman is safe. And she’s smarter than to stay interested in living with someone safe. She’s done it once before, marriage, and it was too easy to be interesting and too hard to be pleasurable, and he left her because she was restless and jagged, and Eve grew more restless and more jagged until she found herself here. She says, “Yes.”

* * *

For that first week—both of them know that Eve will stay far longer — they circle each other in this home. Each morning, Eve awakes to a clean linen blouse and pressed trousers, just barely more polished than Eve is used to. They eat together. One morning, a Saturday maybe, Eve asks her about the book. Oksana takes her to a library more cluttered than it should be, given how many people Eve has seen working here. She says that Eve can borrow anything. Eve realizes only after she is alone once more that most are in French. And there, still lying out on the arm of a chair, _Traumnovelle_.

Eve knows that it is there for her, and she opens it. No notes in the margins, no circling of words. Just numbered pages and sentences Eve can’t quite understand. Not for her, then, or not supposed to seem like it. Eve forces herself to exhale. She thinks of herself before coming here, watching _Eyes Wide Shut_ past two in the morning. She regrets it now, mostly because she forgot how totally insufferable she finds Tom Cruise, and kind of because she knows it’s not the same as the book she can’t read, and maybe a little bit because it got to her in the same way Oksana is getting to her now. The intimacy and the distance and the indecipherability of it all consume her. Eve, mostly successfully, abstracts the sex. She admits that this, too, draws her to Oksana, and, in a singular pseudo-logical move, translates this to freedom. The metaphor is uncomplicated, and Eve likes it. Even so, she can’t stop thinking about it. She can’t stop thinking about her. Eve wanted the upper hand, and all she got was a twitch in her fingers.

She searches the shelves for something to stop it and turns up nothing. She throws every book she touches—classics and linguistics textbooks and vintage erotica—at the same armchair until the whole thing is buried. All of it feels useless. And, as if she were watching (Eve thinks often of this possibility), Oksana enters just as Eve is returning them, one by one, to their places on the shelves.

“Didn’t like them?” she asks. She takes a book from the pile. “This one is pretty bad. I bought it for the cover.” She holds it up: A woman stands alone on a red background, all strong highlights and draping arms. Oksana tosses it aside.

“Come on,” she says. “Stop cleaning. Let’s have fun.”

They watch slasher films that night, three of them in a row, and it’s the closest they’ve ever been. Eve can feel her breathing, steady and quiet and cool. She has never been so aware that Oksana is _alive_. That _she_ is. And she has never been so aware that either one of them could change that. Neither flinches at a single frame.

Eve calls her Villanelle after that.

* * *

Eve doesn’t remember when the notebook appeared on her bedside table, thread-bound and pristine, its pages smoother than anything. She doesn’t remember asking for it, the way she asked for Colgate sensitive toothpaste in place of Denblan. But it is there, one day, early on, and unmistakably for Eve.

Obviously, Eve brought her laptop. She brought her phone. Villanelle—Oksana, she was then, Eve remembers that much—took no issue with it. She couldn’t. If she had, Eve would have left. Villanelle must have known that. So, she didn’t. And Eve didn’t. Instead, she stops using them. She arranges the world’s least legitimate sublease, submits notice of her leave, sets her out-of-office email, and abandons it all. Without reason, Eve feels certain that she can no longer be fully accessible, fully traceable. And so Eve accepts the notebook as easily as she had the toothpaste. A minimally revealing necessity.

Eve knows by looking back that it started with a few pages. Early morning, before breakfast. Nothing of substance, not at first. She knows by looking back that she was different then. The Eve of those first few pages is cautious, almost afraid. She asks questions. She writes down feelings she won’t recognize later. And still, she slips the notebook into the back of her trousers when she finishes, keeping it hidden. The Eve of these days knows some things. She knows Villanelle. She knows that she will do what she can to know her.

Eve does not yet know the same of herself. Already, she has done more than intended. She hasn’t yet regretted it. She won’t.

She doesn’t remember when she starts writing about Villanelle. In reality, there isn’t a starting point. Even the first page, even in the fear to say anything real, Villanelle is there. None of it matters until Eve gets bolder.

At first, she avoids using her name. There are only descriptions, first of her speech, her posture, her clothing. Transparent enough for her to know, if she read them. Eve thinks of this more and more lately, Villanelle reading from this notebook. She knows, has always known, that this is what Villanelle wants from her: someone to see her, to watch her, to fixate on her. Most days, Eve hates knowing this. She convinces herself that everything is instrumental. She is here to learn. Most days, it works. The days it doesn’t, Eve watches the mirrors.

For, most often, she feels it in her bedroom. It’s a feeling that comes from underneath her skin, straining to be known, recognized. Eve paces these days, the way that Niko hated before he left. Even then, she would feel it, and even then she was certain that there was no way to cure it but to move. The parturient’s walk. A dozen of Eve, maybe more, circle the room. She watches the mirrors of her and her and her and waits for Villanelle to appear.

She never does. Rarely does Villanelle violate the space she has given Eve, at least herself, at least when Eve is there. But the thought is there always. Sometimes, Eve will swear she sees her. No opening of a door, no breath on her neck. Just Villanelle’s face, Villanelle’s body reflected ghostlike atop Eve’s own. Eve turns her back only once. Each time after, she grows bolder. She holds her gaze until she convinces herself of her preferred truth. She undresses. She finds the clothing set aside for her. She puts it on. Slowly. She goes for breakfast. She goes to bed. She sits on its edge, staring still at the reflection that is both hers and not. She stares until it disappears. She looks away as if from a flash of light.

* * *

Eve and Villanelle find a routine. They start seeing each other outside of mealtimes. No, they are together more often now. Mostly, they work together, Villanelle on something she will not name (“I’m an artist,” she explains. “I’m very secretive.”) and Eve on her long-abandoned dissertation. Writing is easier here. Overnight, decades’ worth of books and journals appear. Sometimes, she will make a request—whether to Villanelle or to Alda, the only member of her staff who will speak to Eve when she tries. More often, she will simply find what she needs without having asked, appeared as suddenly and seamlessly as the notebook that has long since filled up (replaced now by its twin, similarly without request).

This is not what makes the writing easier. It helps. Of course it helps. But Eve has had libraries and librarians and advising and advisors and none of it has ever made her feel like this. She’s sharper, now. She has perspective. Something to say. And, in these weeks, she is almost satisfied. It isn’t enough.

She wanders more lately. Their ritual of work has only made Eve more desperate for each shred of Villanelle she can have, and more still for the ones she can have without her knowing it. She listens for the creaking of floorboards and the sound of stilettos against them, for a radio and its mimic, and she follows. But this comes long after she hears them. Eve, at least at first, waits until Villanelle has gone and seeks out only the traces she hopes have been left behind. They get clearer with time: Hairs change to scarves and scarves to lipstick-kisses on stationery. Eve stops waiting. She draws near enough that the signs change, too. The first time she hears it, Eve is sure she has traced the wrong person. Villanelle’s steady breathing turns rapid and uneven in these moments with Eve close but hidden behind her. Sometimes, there is almost a laugh. And Eve is certain that she knows.

It changes for good on a Thursday afternoon. Villanelle’s hand turns the golden handle of a glass-paneled door on the second floor. Eve moves in closer, trying to get an angle that reveals more than the sun’s intrusive glare. The door opens, and Villanelle becomes obscured behind it, and Eve grabs the handle before it closes entirely. Eve pushes the door six inches forward, then slips inside. She makes out a sparse forest of dark, angular shapes, not quite identifiable in the afternoon sun, and Villanelle turns to face her. A breath, a fraction of a laugh, and Villanelle has Eve cornered.

The wall’s boiserie pressing into her back, Eve is certain of everything. This is it, she knows, this moment, the thing that has kept everyone else in Villanelle’s life from resurfacing. Even shaking, Eve wants nothing so much as to watch Villanelle’s face. To make out every thought that leads her to what comes next. To telegraph that she _knows_ —knows all of it, more than she has told her or suggested or even written down. She wants her to see that she isn’t afraid.

But Eve is afraid. She doesn’t watch Villanelle’s face. She watches her hands. Her hands, as steady as her breathing, move more slowly than Eve had expected. Empty, too. And as these empty hands approach Eve, bridging what little space is left between them, she pictures the bruises they will leave on her neck. She wonders whether they will be as clean and rich as hers. But Villanelle’s hands leave nothing behind. Instead, they find Eve’s cheeks and rest gently there.

Villanelle asks, “What are you doing?” Eve sees her face for the first time: She is smiling, nearly laughing. Backlit and bare-faced, she looks almost innocent.

Eve has imagined how this moment would play out each night since she began tracking her. Now, finally able to act, she has nothing. “I’m studying the floor plan,” she says, probably too eagerly. “I have this really awful—“

Villanelle shifts her hands, holding them just lower and more tightly on Eve’s face than before. “You know, Eve, you are really strange sometimes. I know that you were following me.”

“Yeah, uh, I figured if anyone knew the place…”

“Stop it. I know what you’re doing. You don’t have to be embarrassed.”

“Really?” She breaks free of Villanelle’s grip. “You know what I’m doing? Bullshit. I know what you— No, you know what? That’s it. You have no idea what I’m thinking.”

Villanelle doesn’t try to touch Eve again, but she stays uncomfortably close, their chests inches apart. “Tell me.”

“What are we doing?”

“That’s what you’re thinking?” Disappointment. Eve feels warm, adjusts.

“Sometimes,” she says.

“What else are you thinking?”

“Why am I here?”

Impatiently, now, “What else?”

“No. I want an answer.”

For a moment, Villanelle smiles again, but she replaces it just as quickly with an exaggeratedly furrowed brow. “I don’t know,” she says at last. “Broad questions.”

“Why did you invite me here?”

“I told you. I’m lonely.”

“Why me?” Eve asks.

“You’re my type.”

Until now, Eve has made an effort to limit her reactions, but Villanelle’s answer has shifted too much already. Eve says, “Your type?”

“I’m joking, Eve!” She touches her again this time, a tap on the arm with an air of rehearsal. “Come on,” Villanelle tells her, “have a sense of humor! We’re friends. I like you.”

“Why?”

“You know, the more you ask me these ridiculous questions, the less I can explain it.” In this moment, she turns ninety degrees and walks to the door. Opening it, she says, “Have fun in my gym.”

Eve misses dinner for the first time, and they don’t see each other for 36 hours. On the third day of the aftermath, tentatively reunited, Villanelle reaches across the table for Eve’s hand. Eve flinches. “I’m going away,” Villanelle tells her. “Tomorrow morning.”

“Why?” Eve hates that this is her, always two steps behind, childish, asking stupid, one-word questions. She’s changed. She’s supposed to have changed.

“Business.”

“Where?”

Villanelle shrugs. “Not far. I’ll be home soon.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Eve says. The news has returned her to the woman she was before, one with an end. The script falls back into place. “I’ll go home.”

“Don’t say that. Don’t be jealous. Stay here.” Both hands extended now, fingers frantic, then the touch of metal, warm from being held so long. “Here,” she says, “here. You can look after things here. These are my keys. The whole property.”

“Why would I want these?”

An inversion. Grip loose, voice firm. “Stop it,” she says. The keys chime pleasantly against each other, and it’s only at their stopping that Eve realizes they’ve been dropped before her. “I know you, Eve. You want to figure me out. I am letting you.”

“You can’t just tell me?”

“Eve! I am surprised at you. You think you would like me to tell you? It’s too boring for you. For us. Come on. Stay here. Go through my things. My closets. My drawers. My office. My bedroom. Stay.”

“No,” Eve says, and she can hardly believe herself as she’s saying it. “I’m not your— Your _thing._ Jesus Christ. Are you kidding?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m not like you.”

“Eve, if this is—“

“I’m not playing a game. Do you—? Do you even understand that?”

“Okay.” Villanelle has retreated entirely now. Even her eyes are lowered so that, when Eve looks directly at her, they appear closed. It’s so clearly calculated, so clearly rehearsed, that Eve swears she can see her straining to stay this way. “I get it.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I need you to help me.”

“Bullshit.”

And there it is. In the instant before her answer, Villanelle breaks. She glows again, white-hot. She bites her lip. “Do you think I want to ask you like this?”

Eve studies Villanelle’s hands. Her left is moving back toward the center of the table, already anticipating Eve’s surrender. Her right is holding an empty fork, maneuvering it between her fingers. Eve says, “I don’t think you do anything you don’t want to.”

Uncomfortably convincingly, uncomfortably suddenly, Villanelle is shaky-voiced: “It can’t be empty.”

“Don’t worry,” Eve tells her. “It won’t be.”

“I can’t be alone. I don’t feel safe, Eve. Once I get back…” Inhale. There is a man who…” Exhale.

“You think I’m going to save you?”

“Yes.”

“You know I’m not the only person here.”

“I don’t trust them. My guard, he is a coward, and very easily bought.” Villanelle’s left hand reaches its destination, fingers brushing Eve’s. She nudges the keys toward Eves hand, still residually warmer than the rest of the room. “Not you, Eve. You’re different. I trust you.”

Eve takes the keys. She covers them with her fingers, pressing them into her palm. She relaxes just before she draws blood.

Villanelle is gone before breakfast the next morning, so Eve eats alone. The place seems emptier than it should be without her, _is_ emptier—not figuratively, not emotionally, but literally, physically. Villanelle has staff; it’s part of this whole _thing._ But Eve only sees the woman who serves her breakfast—Iren? Eve doesn’t know. Isn’t sure, at least. When she finishes (eggs Florentine—the same as her first morning), she walks upstairs and begins.

The first door she opens is unlocked. Just another room she’d never noticed, small with large windows and crowded shelves on each wall. Pottery, a violin, old magazines—none of it fitting together, some of it well kept. The next a studio, conservatory, library— And here, beside the one they shared is the office that is Villanelle’s alone. This is how Eve understands it, anyway, as the place that is not hers. Circling it, she grows less certain; each corner seems to unearth a part of Eve she had intended to leave behind. Even their desks are alike. The same puzzles and names and photographs—even, Eve realizes, not entirely surprised, the one of herself and Niko she had never quite gotten around to taking down. Eve knows that there is more she should consider than the thought that consumes her on seeing the photo. The question, for instance, of whether this is the same photo from Eve’s home or a copy of it, and then the question of how and when she did obtain it, if not from Eve’s own flat— _that_ matters. That would tell her about Villanelle’s procedure, her patterns. And Eve could catch her, wholly and honestly, before the next time. There are some feelings, even—fear being the primary one—that Eve could justify to herself as reasonable in this moment. But these feelings are not Eve’s. Instead, she feels almost embarrassed, half at the photo and half that she has so long avoided being photographed that _this_ is how Villanelle must see her. She’s so small in that photo, rounding her shoulders, hand drawn to her ear. In another, better world, Eve thinks, there is a photo of her _gleaming_ , that thing of which Villanelle is master. But there is not, so this is Eve: dull, tiny, unfinished.

And then it isn’t. The shiny silver of a closed laptop’s insignia reflects someone better. This version of Eve makes sense, the hard half-face with the wrinkled brow. Eve opens the laptop, and the face is gone, screen illuminated. A neon pink Post-It note is stuck to the top right corner. On it, Villanelle has written passwords in perfect script. It’s as if she’s set up a whole life just for Eve to find, and it’s condescending as shit. She uses it anyway, checks inboxes and search histories and anything else there is. One account, she’s worked on—correspondences with at least a dozen more accounts, with dates that stretch months back. Each is friendly. Some—including the most recent—contain dates. Lille. Today. Half six. Is she there now, or minutes away and waiting? Eve nearly keeps herself from believing it, but she keeps searching. Tomorrow, there will be reports of a diplomat on holiday, dead minutes after breaking off from his family on their architectural tour. Today, there is only a photograph of a round-faced man in a bowtie and braces. His is the only face Eve doesn’t recognize. She pockets the photo, unafraid of being caught, and locks the door behind her.

She goes on. One of the closets—more than one, Eve knows from the clothing she wears now—is different from the others. The clothes are simpler. Monochrome blacks and whites and charcoals and ivories and, in the farthest corner from the door, the deepest of greens and blues. They’re meant for Eve.

She goes on. A gallery. An observatory. Three large bedrooms, identical to one another but not to Eve’s. A fourth, certainly belonging to Villanelle. Eve thinks of her offer. She thinks of everything she has been longing to do since meeting her. She opens a drawer. A cheap lighter, an expensive vibrator; pillow mist, facial mist; two old postcards (Budapest, Lisbon), both written in French. No mysteries solved, no secrets uncovered. Just the question Eve cannot stop from coming: Did Villanelle arrange all of this in the way she had prepared her office? The thought of this is different somehow, more intimate—the worse violation or the more thoughtful gift.

She goes on. A laundry room. Half a dozen staff bedrooms, lived-in, then left. The theater. A wine room. At last, the door that Villanelle warned her never to open. Eve has been patient, taking the most logical route through the hallways, knowing all along that they would lead here. She turns the key and pushes open the door. The scent of blood is immediate and fresh. She has smelled nothing but warm meals and La Villanelle since arriving, and the disruption is almost welcome. Eve inhales once more, sharply, and searches for a source of light. Her right hand to the wall, she finds velvet curtains just feet from the door, and struggles to draw them back. The day is clearer than usual, and the sea is bright, shimmering. The keys fall from her hand, and Eve thinks of them only for a moment before she turns back toward the room.

Made almost beautiful in the sunlight, women’s bodies—some naked, others elaborately clothed—are draped over furniture with a careless kind of grace. Nothing is consistent, until it is. The women, taken together, look like Eve. She studies them, trying to recognize something—anything—else. She should know their names, should know them from their photos, but there is so much blood on the floor and so little in their faces that the task feels impossible. There is only Eve and Eve and Eve and Eve and Eve steps forward. She extends a hand toward the woman nearest her. The body nearest her. There is no woman there. She presses her palm into the space below the body’s left shoulder. The flesh gives as it would in life, even with its color gone, and the bone below feels solid and strong. Like Villanelle’s bruise, the woman’s injuries are frozen in time, framed by still-wet blood that seems too red to be real.

Eve circles the room like this, studying slit throats and bruises and entry wounds. She looks for patterns or dates or proof that she has misunderstood. She imagines staying here for weeks more, returning to this room, making sense of it all. Writing down everything she’s thinking, inches away from Villanelle, working and eating and sleeping beside her. Understanding.

She sits here for some time, long enough to watch the shadows move, in a too-clean wingback chair. The weeks turn to nothing. Eve now imagines staying here forever, for the place is surely hers. Like this, she remembers the keys. Like the soles of Eve’s shoes, they are sure to be bloodstained.

Most of it washes away. All but one of the keys, the final one, are entirely clean within seconds. The final one, too, is, for a moment, as it was before its use. The next instant, the blood reappears. Each time Eve cleans it, the blood comes once more, until she understands. Eve is caught, the way she’d hoped to catch Villanelle. The way, for the moment between her opening the door and dropping the keys, she had. Meaning, in a way, Eve had beaten her there. Fine, then.

She cooks for herself that night (even Iren—it’s definitely Iren—is gone now), the first time since leaving her flat. The process is much the same: She selects two plastic containers, spoons their contents into a pan, and heats it as long as she can be bothered to wait. Then, alone at the countertop, Eve eats what she supposes, if Villanelle comes back tonight, may be her last meal: day-old halibut over polenta, the kind of anticlimax Eve thought she’d escaped.

When she finishes, she returns to the closet that is for her but not hers and selects a jewel-toned dress. Eve is relying on her supposition that Villanelle will come back tonight. She would like to be prepared.

The dress is tighter than Eve is used to. She is still learning how to move in it when Villanelle arrives upstairs, waiting outside the door to Eve’s bedroom, as close as she will ever come to being caught entering. As if she has any claim to it, Eve invites her in.

“Thank you. I’m sorry that it is so late.”

“No, uh, no, how was your—?”

“Not too bad. Thank you. You know, nobody ever asks me, but—“ Villanelle feigns a realization, obvious enough that it is certainly intentional. “You should sleep, Eve.”

“Yeah, uh, thanks. Goodnight, then, I guess.”

“I’m sorry, I promise this is all I need: Do you still have my keys?”

“Yeah.“ Eve holds them up. “Right here.” She gives them to her. Never, when she was imagining this moment, did Eve think her hands would be so still. The keys rattle against each other as Villanelle drags her fingers across them. Eve knows that she doesn’t need to look. She knows by the bodies that look like hers how many times Villanelle has done this before. It’s part of the game, and she wants to resent her for it. She doesn’t. She resents only that she isn’t holding the keys.

Villanelle says her name so gently that Eve nearly misses the excitement in it. Then, she says, “Have you lost one?” and it is impossible for Eve to convince herself it could ever have been anything else.

“Is that what they usually say?” Eve asks. She wants it to mean _I’m not afraid of you_. And this time, Eve isn’t afraid of her, but she remembers still the cool certainty in Villanelle’s voice when she told her she was different. She wants to know that she was right, even if it was a lie.

“Mm, not always.” She drops the keys into a dish of tangled jewelry on the bedside table. None of it is Eve’s; it, like everything, had been waiting for her. “The one before you, she was funny. Not funny like you, Eve, but funny, you know? She said— It’s very rude not to listen to a person when they’re talking. No, Eve, I am saying that to you. What she said was funnier. She said she had a heavy period.”

Eve nearly laughs with her. Then, she remembers the key. She can feel the blood on her skin, if she pays enough attention to it. The strange warmth of it, how thin it feels as it meets the sweat on Eve’s neck. Like the key itself is bleeding. Like Eve is. She takes off her shoes. She settles into her bed. She rests her head on her arms, knowing now that they too will be stained red.

Villanelle knows that Eve has kept the key. Eve knew that she would know even as she made the choice. There are only so many choices she has left. She doesn’t untie her hair or slip the key from the bun. She just breathes. The same scent of oak and citrus and moss, the one that envelops all but one room, her most beloved. “Come lie down with me.”

“You know I am going to kill you, right?”

“Yes,” Eve says. “Come lie down with me.”

She does. “Do you think you are going to seduce me?”

“Do you want me to?”

“Try.”

Eve watches herself in eight gold-rimmed mirrors as she positions herself atop Villanelle.

She laughs at this. “Eve!” Villanelle scolds. She laughs again. With her throat exposed like this, Eve can see just where the bruise ends, and she covers it with her palm. “Go slower.” Eve’s thumb traces the pink on Villanelle’s cheeks, and it finds no warmth in them. Villanelle closes her eyes.

“Is it your first time?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“How romantic.”

Eve kisses her neck just hard enough that the bruise, in the morning, will be joined by a second.

Villanelle laughs again. “You’re like a teenager,” she says, and Eve does it again.

Villanelle breaks their silent agreement: She touches Eve. Her back, first, hands sliding up the fabric of the deep blue dress that is for Eve but not for Eve. She unzips it halfway before stopping, and Eve knows where her hands will go next. She pulls the key from her hair. She waits. At last, Villanelle reaches her neck, tightening her fingers around the blood-dampened hair at its nape. As her grip loosens, Eve draws back and watches her.

Villanelle doesn’t even open her eyes. She doesn’t need to. When she speaks, there’s an amused kind of lilt to it: “You can’t hurt me with that.”

“I know what you do. I know how.”

“Don’t be stupid. I know you know how.”

“You just don’t think I can hurt you.”

“I don’t think you can hurt anyone.”

And Villanelle would be right, months ago, maybe even last night, but Eve is different now, even if she doesn’t know how. She doesn’t want to know how. She presses the key to Villanelle’s eye and drags. She is grateful, now, for the key’s bleeding; Villanelle’s blood mingles so easily with the key’s that Eve can pretend she’s caused none of it. Of course, Villanelle’s screaming, the resistance with which Eve’s hand is met, the tightness in her stomach—all of this is undeniable.

What’s worse, Eve doesn’t want to run. Like the rush of the first week, curiosity holds her in place. Still, she knows one thing already: Villanelle won’t die of this. She will barely be slowed. And with this, she knows one more: She cannot stay.

There were weapons in one of Villanelle’s closets. Real ones. Weapons that could kill her. Eve didn’t take one to the bedroom. She didn’t want to take one. She didn’t want to use it. Eve isn’t certain yet, but she knows she could go there now. She could beat Villanelle to it. This is where they would have to go anyway, if she were killing Eve. It would be easy, and Villanelle would be dead. But Eve doesn’t know that she wants Villanelle dead. Eve only wants to know where she was, then go there herself, then go places Villanelle will never touch. She takes the ring of keys from the bedside table and runs.

* * *

Both of them are holding guns when Villanelle finds her. Even now, Villanelle holds hers casually, easily. Not so much as a part of herself—this would suggest more care than she affords it—as something simply unquestionable _._ The way Eve ties back her hair, Villanelle holds this gun: without a second thought. At the sight of it, Eve feels suddenly self-conscious. She lowers hers to the desk and rests a hand atop it.

Eve will survive this. In the coming weeks, she will feel a compulsion to apologize—sometimes to Villanelle, to Niko, to Alda, to anyone who would accept it. These compulsions will disappear more quickly than Eve expected. It will take much longer for her to admit their emptiness, but, in the moment—in this moment—she feels it completely. Seeing Villanelle like this is enough. Eve forgives herself of all of it.

She says, “Go ahead.”

Villanelle doesn’t, and Eve doesn’t, but neither allows a finger to move from her gun. Refusing to look higher, Eve watches the stillness of Villanelle’s throat. A small amount of blood—smeared, not dripping, and bright red—joins the blue, which should also be blood but is not.

* * *

They are on a train again, sitting close again. The ride is longer this time, heading south this time. It will be warmer there, but it’s still cold in their car. Eve thinks so, anyway, but it’s been weeks since she’s felt the chill that comes with being afraid. She’s forgotten what it feels like. It could be either. Her or the air. Villanelle has bent her head into Eve’s shoulder. Restful, if not for her open eye, the one unmarred, staring ahead through the gaps in the seats. Eve is holding her sixth notebook in her lap, making edits. She makes a conscious effort to wrinkle her brow when she comes to a gap. Lack of expression has become habit for her, but she doesn’t want Villanelle to know this yet. She sighs.

“What is it?” Villanelle asks her, unpleasantly soft-voiced, like she’s trying to remind Eve of a life she once had.

“You never thought of becoming a nurse?”

A large exhale, a laugh that isn’t. “Me?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a little sexist of you, Eve.” She’s smiling. Eve can hear it.

“Sexist of the statistics, I guess,“ she says. "But it’s usually nurses. Or care-givers, generally. Babysitters, moms.” Villanelle’s nose wrinkles at the shape of this most recent vowel, but Eve goes on. “Just, you know, when you’re looking for patterns.”

“Hm. Sounds boring.” Villanelle shifts lazily in her seat and nudges Eve’s chin with her head, catlike. The scarf she’s had draped over her head falls around her neck. “I’m exceptional,” she says. “Ask me the real question.”

“I’ll wait.”

“No, no, no, wait, I’ll guess.” Villanelle pulls the scarf into her lap. “’How did you start?’ ‘How did you know?’ ‘How did you _find out_?’”

“No.”

“Okay,” Villanelle says, drawing out the word. She turns her head, facing Eve directly, unhidden. “What if I asked you?”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Please drop a comment/kudos if you're so inclined; this fic has been chilling in my life/laptop/mind for ages, so consider validation incredibly craved.


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